Movie review

Jason Bourne

Jason Bourne is going gray at the temples — just like Batman! They should be friends — and so is the “Bourne” franchise. I love the series, but “Jason Bourne” is the worst of the five.

Mind you, so-so Bourne beats most of what else is out there. This time J.B. (Matt Damon) has gone off the grid, making his living as a brawler in Greece, when a hack containing information about his past is carried out in Iceland by Parsons (Julia Stiles), attracting the ire of the CIA’s new cyber chief (Alicia Vikander) and Langley’s new boss (Tommy Lee Jones). Parsons finds out more about the covert ops in which Bourne’s father was killed by the Asset (Vincent Cassel), whose new assignment is to terminate Bourne with extreme prejudice.

I still enjoy everything about the Bourne movies — the terrifying bureaucracy of the dialogue (“Close your account” means “Shoot the guy you have tied up in your bathtub”); the way you can count on a motorcycle being driven up an outdoor staircase; the portrayal of a CIA that is alarmingly efficient and reassuringly evil. In an arch-but-not-quite-paranoid subplot, a Facebook-like company cuts a devilish deal with the agency.

Still, like the latest remix of Moby’s “Extreme Ways” on the soundtrack, everything is the same yet not quite as good. The trademark breathless action, with its tight close-ups and handheld cameras, is less smoothly edited than usual, which leads to a disjointed feel. Other elements mark the series’ first unfortunate steps toward self-parody, notably the nonstop jittery string music and the absurdly noncovert climax (aren’t hit men supposed to be more discreet than running over scores of other cars in a SWAT truck on the Las Vegas strip?). “They’re fighting!” exclaims a CIA observer of a Bourne encounter in Berlin. Yeah, pretty much.

The Asset, spotting Bourne knocked out below him on the ground, elects not to shoot him in the head but to take a leisurely trip down the stairs to provide fleeing time. In a crowd in Athens, Parsons immediately gets tagged by the watchers at Langley because of her neon-blond hair. What kind of a superspy forgets to wear her hoodie?

Reteaming with Paul Greengrass (who directed the stellar second and third Bourne movies), Damon is riveting throughout, but too much of Bourne’s success depends on luck and on the Vikander character’s incessant, and puzzling, bailouts. She’s so vital to his health that they could have called this one “The Bourne Dependency.”

It’s been nine years since the last Damon-Greengrass Bourne movie, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which ended with a great smash-the-gong note of cinematic perfection. There was no reason for the pair to return to this material unless they could top “Ultimatum.” They couldn’t.